Not only did Arthur C. Clarke invent the communications satellite, he also dreamt up the internet, the iPad and e-newspapers.
Oh, and Skype - see the image above , taken from 2001: a Space Odyssey (for which I guess we should give Stanley Kubrick a smidgeon of credit for co-writing with Clarke and directing)
The extract below is from Clarke's novel version of 2001 (Thanks to Cinema Fist, which has a longer extract.)
"Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites."
4 comments:
All I can say on reading the paragraph: Men with vision.
One difference is that people today don't get amazed by technology. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0MpBQG3-E
And didn't he predict we'd be finding other planets? And have intelligent robots? And have a base on the moon?
What a bleak and horrible future we live in!
I should add that the one thing science fiction writers and futurologists always seem to get wrong or simply leave out of their calculations is the economic costs of future technology and the influence of politics (hence no moon base).
It's hard to fault them getting that wrong. A lot of them operated in an area of perceived perpetual upturn for America ('40-'63), so it probably seemed like the expense would be affordable, and the political drive to achieve ('we choose to go to the moon') would persist. Within 10 years of that era ending, a different reality was setting in.
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